Keith Shirley

I regularly get asked my opinion on .eu domains and I’m afraid it’s not positive. I’m not as down on the whole thing as John McCormac is in his article where the following really sums it up:

“The incompetence of Eurid management is quite staggering. How a bunch of people who had only ever run a third rate, mickey mouse ccTLD ever got the contract to run the .eu ccTLD is a mystery. The result was the mess that is .eu ccTLD.”

For those of you that are not familiar with the term – ccTLD is basically referring to top level domains like the .com extension. Eurid are the people who run the .eu top level domain.

I must admit I’m a little bitter here as when the .eu domains were coming out I jumped through all their complicated hoops to prove the entitlement for a domain I wanted. What really annoyed me was that the answer back basically said I was not entitled to use the domain (even though I know I was). If someone had been faster I would have accepted that. It was not worth the legal costs to challange their answer.

What really annoyed me was when the domains went live – I checked again and the domain was up for sale. It was obviously registered by a company that had no connection to the name and was basically hijacked. I refused to pay – so I’m glad to see they are finally cracking down on it.

The whole .eu thing has been a flop. The majority of people don’t  seem to know that it exists (ok - the geeks do) and compared to the ease of registering a .com address it seems like a real headache.

I imagine the domains will become more popular over time as people wish to trade eu wide and other names become harder to get. For the time being however I advise people not to get too stressed about it.

Now to go see if my domain has become available.